Balkanalysis.com

By Scott Taylor for Balkanalysis.com* Editor’s note: Two former British military officers working as OSCE observers during the August conflict in South Ossetia have recently spoken out in The Times of London, condemning Georgia, and not Russia, for the commencement of hostilities then. Their verdict harmonizes with the following special briefing for Balkanalysis.com, written by [...]

By Lara Scarpitta* It is old news that geography matters in foreign policy. A dormant EC/EU had to learn this vital lesson in 1989, when communism crumbled behind its safe walls. Faced with the sudden prospect of bordering poor, unpredictable and unstable neighbours, it responded by anchoring the former soviet satellites of Central Europe with [...]

By Alisa Voznaya The wars of independence in the de facto breakaway regions of Georgia’s Abkhazia and Russia’s Chechnya in the early 1990′s resulted in parallel discourses of defiance and searches for independence. Yet recently the paths of these Caucasian neighbors have begun to diverge dramatically. The Georgian government’s three-day military campaign in the Kodori [...]

By Ana Toklikishvili* Almost 4,000 Chechens who fled from their country following the outbreak of war in 1999 have been granted prima facie refugee status by the Georgian government. As of April 2004, the Ministry of Refugees and Accommodation has registered 3,856 Chechen refugees. However, since then the number seems to have decreased to 2.600. [...]

Every day this week, Balkanalysis.com will publish a new article on the fascinating and complex region of the Caucasus. Topics will range from security to politics and economics, and cover the major countries of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, as well as cross-border issues in the North Caucasus and first-hand testimony of the situation on the [...]

The phones were silent at the OSCE’s Skopje’s headquarters this afternoon as staff grappled with a new and unexpected problem: the sensational news that one of the mission’s own high officials, Georgian national Zurab Lomashvili, had been arrested for drug trafficking while abroad. Russia’s Interfax reported yesterday that the career diplomat and previous deputy head [...]

As 2006 dawns, let’s take a moment to look back on the year 2005 and note some salient details about this website’s performance. First of all, 2005 saw 129 new articles published on Balkanalysis.com- in addition to several hundred others added to our back archive on the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL), which [...]

Balkanalysis.com would like to take this opportunity to announce a short winter break, from the period of Dec. 23-Jan. 3. While new articles will not be posted during this period, readers will be able to take the opportunity to peruse the archives at their leisure. We would also like to announce that final uploads of [...]

Exactly one year ago, this exclusive report from the top of the Caucasus Mountains was published on Antiwar.com . The beautiful pictures and testimony from ordinary civilians trapped by political interests makes for compelling and provocative reading. When it comes to coverage of the ongoing feud between Georgia and Russia, the Western mass media have [...]

The US, Russia, and apologists in the Western media have lately been criticizing Georgia for failing to “crack down” on a perceived al Qaeda threat in the Pankisi Gorge. As the first part of this article showed, such a threat may actually be exaggerated, or in fact completely spurious. Assuming that there is at least [...]